When it comes to managing money as a couple, my husband Joe and I have tried all of the things.
For the first 4 years we were married, we did not combine finances. We just kept our separate accounts from before our marriage. Per our pre-farm agreement, I paid our living expenses from my income so we could re-invest any money he made on the farm back into the farm. So it made sense to just keep my existing account to pay bills out of.
When we moved to Bozeman, bought our house, and suddenly went from about 30 paychecks per year to 50 paychecks per year (26 mine, 24 his), I convinced Joe to shed our individual accounts and combine into one joint account for ease of management. So for the last 4 years we have had combined finances.
To combine or not to combine…that’s just one question.
Who manages the money?
When I talk about “managing finances” I’m talking about planning, tracking spending, budgeting, cash management etc…
For the first 5 years of our marriage, I managed most of our personal finances and Joe managed all of the farm finances (a separate LLC) which due to IRS regulation, did include our rent payment and some utilities.
We didn’t budget together, we didn’t have household meetings and we rarely talked about money.
Then 3 years ago, I got inspired to start this personal finance blog. Since my degree is in Accounting, I had experience with budgeting but had never kept a personal budget. In order to help people manage their money, I wanted to start a household budget so that I could teach from personal experience as well. I also wanted to learn how to use the various online budgeting tools like Mint, YNAB and Every Dollar.
That is when I started pestering Joe to get more involved with our personal finances. In order to have a household budget, we needed to coordinate on when spending would happen. Actually, nagging might be a more accurate description of my first attempt at getting Joe to budget with me.
He was NOT on board with budgeting. He explained that he simply doesn’t care that much about money and that he didn’t want to be restricted by the budget. Why are we working so hard if not to spend money on the things we want, when we want? He was happy to let me continue managing our money since I enjoy it more than he does anyway.
As in all desperate situations, I took to the Google. The #1 most common advice I found said to set financial goals together. I love planning and goal setting so I went straight to trying to convince him how much more awesome our lives would be if we set financial goals together and budgeted so that we could save more money and make those dreams come to life. I promised future vacations to Tahiti, more generous gift giving at Christmas and even early retirement!
There was one big problem with this. He is NOT a planner. For him, it’s really important to live in the moment. He’s not a planner, he’s not a goal setter.
And to be fair, that’s one of the things I love about him. He is so grounded and present. So I couldn’t even be mad about it (well except I was mad about it…cause you know…anger isn’t the most rational emotion).
Dreaming together was a big fail. It didn’t entice him into a more active role and it left me feeling like his rejection of our “joint dreams” was a rejection of our relationship or maybe even a rejection of me.
I shed some tears over this. I would try to reason with myself that while personal finance is important and fun for me, he SHOULD be allowed to have his own interests. He doesn’t force me to play video games, so I shouldn’t force him into my money “hobby”.
But I persisted. Helping people with their finances is important to me, and I believed that managing money together would improve our communication in that area since communication is a skill that requires practice.
What finally moved the needle
After a few months of failing to convince Joe that we should do a household budget, we had a hard conversation. It was a hard conversation because I had done some serious soul searching about WHY I wanted Joe to be more involved in our finances. Sure, learning budgeting to help clients IS a big part of the reason why I wanted this but over time, I thought of other reasons that I really did want to do this.
Those reasons were:
-I believed that Joe could help me fix some of my spending hangups. Due to a lifetime of bare bones spending, I developed some unhealthy habits. Primarily, feeling guilty about buying any “want”, even if I had budgeted and planned for it. Since Joe doesn’t experience that, I thought he could coach me, to help me chill the F out.
-I realized that while I am really good at saving money on the little things, Joe actually is better at making decisions on big things. I pinch pennies so hard but when it comes to big purchases like vacations, I’m like “yeah sure, that’s why I pinch pennies, take my money”. Joe is the other way around, he is thoughtful and careful with big purchases but doesn’t pay much attention to small stuff. So I thought we could lean in to that and get him more involved on more medium sized and all large sized purchasing decisions.
-I wanted to feel like a unified team. This was were I got emotional. The past few months of being in disagreement on the topic had been tough. Even if we eventually decided to not manage them together, I wanted to at least try it out. If he hated budgeting, I promised I would drop it.
Three years of weekly budget meetings later, Joe still doesn’t love budgeting but we have been able to get on the same page with budgeting, improve our communication about money and really manage our money together.
So to extract the key takeaways…
Here are the tips that I recommend for couples trying to budget together:
Tip #1 Share the emotions and the numbers
Some partners are going to need to see the numbers, some are going to need to see the emotions, and some are going to need to see both. Everyone takes in information in different ways. I had been primarily talking about the numbers since that’s how I best understand information. I created preliminary budgets, talked about historical spending and calculated the time it would take to achieve the financial goals that I thought we should collectively want to achieve. When I finally showed the emotion behind it, Joe finally understood how important it was to me. Once he knew how important it was to me, he agreed to becoming more involved in our finances.
Tip #2 Identify your weaknesses
When I was first trying to build our household budget, it probably came off like “hey, you are spending willy nilly, and I’m so good at money, I’m going to show you how it’s done…with a budget”. That wasn’t my intention but I think it was part of the problem and I think this problem plagues a lot of couples. If you think you are the responsible one, the one that knows best, maybe check yourself. It’s impossible to be good at every facet of personal finance. If you can identify your areas of weakness, your bad habits and your mess ups, you will have a better likelihood of convincing your partner to help out.
Tip #3 Identify their strengths
Show them what they can bring to the table. Who would want to join a project if they feel like they have nothing to contribute? I wouldn’t. It can take some time and some observational skills from both partners to identify what their financial strengths are but it will help them want to participate.
Tip #4 Tread lightly
I love talking about money but as you probably know, it can be SO difficult sometimes. Your partner may have a history with money that is very painful. Even though Joe and I are well on our way to Financial Independence and have been meeting regularly to talk about money, I still sometimes break down and cry when we are meeting. Just a few weeks ago I cried explaining why I thought we should keep such a big emergency fund (because part of the emergency fund is my “I’m not going to starve to death” money and just explaining why I’ve kept that money triggered me). Try to be sensitive that their experience is likely different than yours and facing the budget and facing the debt may be very emotionally draining.
Tip #5 Make it a fun experience
We picked Sunday mornings as the best time to meet to go over our budget. It was around the same time that Joe learned how to make lattes at home. So we made it our routine to drink lattes while we go over the budget. It has really become a fun habit for us that I look forward to all week. Another example of this I heard from a channel that I like on YouTube that does “Beers and Budgeting” as a way to make it fun. If you can pair your money management with something else you both enjoy, that will lessen the stress of the situation.
Tip #6 Don’t expect too much at once
It takes awhile to establish these routines, to learn how to budget and to learn how to communicate about money with your partner. Make sure you give it time and don’t give up!
How do you and your spouse manage your finances?
Have you struggled to manage money with a partner?
For additional reading on the subject: